Melissa Lefcourt doesn’t celebrate her birthdays. She’s never met her birth parents or gotten answers to questions that plagued her throughout childhood: Who are they? What are they like? Why didn’t they raise me themselves?
Instead, Lefcourt celebrates what she and her adoptive parents, Mary and Robert Lefcourt of Fishersville, Va., call “Gotcha Day.” On September 8, 2000, the then-Northfield couple drove to Philadelphia to meet Melissa when she was 8 days old. The Lefcourts had three boys already, but after the birth of their last child, Mary’s doctor told her that it wasn’t safe to carry another. Knowing that his wife always wanted a daughter, Rob suggested they adopt one.
Mary remembers her initial trepidations. The couple would have to be fingerprinted; undergo a criminal background check; and provide references, tax returns, and letters from doctors attesting that neither of them was receiving treatment for a mental illness or substance-use disorder. A social worker from Lund, the nonprofit agency in South Burlington handling the adoption, would visit their house for several hours and interview each of them separately for what’s called a home study. That process would determine whether theirs was a stable and healthy environment for placing a child. It all seemed daunting.
That is, until the Lefcourts met Wanda Audette, then Lund’s director of adoption, whom Mary called “my favorite person in the whole world.” Audette approached the process with understanding and respect, Mary said, answering all of her questions matter-of-factly and without judgment.
As Mary came to discover, Audette’s work wasn’t finished once Mary had her baby in her arms — or even after the couple finalized Melissa’s adoption in court months later. Whenever Mary was struggling as a mother, she could call Audette for advice on any subject, from how to talk to Melissa about where she came from to how to style the multiracial girl’s hair.
“To this day, Wanda is part of my life,” Mary said. “I am very, very thankful for the gift she gave us. And Melissa feels the same way.” In fact, Melissa, now 25, has since adopted two children of her own.
Lund, Vermont’s oldest and largest nonprofit adoption agency, recently celebrated the 12,000th adoption in its 135-year history. From when she joined the organization in October 1995 to her retirement in June, Audette personally handled 5,500 of them.
But Audette’s legacy isn’t written in numbers alone. During her tenure, she expanded the pool of people eligible to become adoptive parents to include single people and same-sex couples. She also broadened Lund’s scope from focusing almost exclusively on adoptions to advising and supporting birth parents in whatever decision they make, be it adoption, raising their child or seeking an abortion elsewhere.
As a cofounder of Project Family, Lund’s nationally acclaimed partnership with the Vermont Department for Children and Families, Audette helped find families for children and teens in state custody who were once labeled “unadoptable.” And she made sure that even after an adoption was finalized, Lund would continue to provide support to birth parents and adoptive families — for life, if necessary. As she often told clients, “Adoption is not an event but a journey.”
Lund’s mission has evolved considerably since its founding in 1890, an era when society considered unwed mothers to be social deviants, unfit to be seen in public. With almost superhuman compassion and unbowed dedication to her clients, Audette helped lift the veil of secrecy and shame that long surrounded the adoption process and redefined it as one that encourages openness, honesty and, when appropriate, the involvement of birth parents in their children’s lives. According to the families she helped create and the colleagues who will carry Lund forward, that may have been Audette’s most profound and enduring impact.
Experts report that an adoption typically affects at least five people: the birth parents, the adoptive parents and the child. Factor in siblings, extended families and kinship networks, and that number grows to 10 to 15. Based on those figures, Audette has touched the lives of a population larger than the city of Burlington’s.
Said Sara Byers, former chair of Lund’s board of trustees, “Wanda has changed the very social fabric of Vermont.”
Bundles of Joy
Early on the morning of July 18, 2024, David and Victoria Seaver were awakened by a phone call.
“There’s a woman in labor up at UVM Medical Center, and she’s chosen you and Victoria to be the parents,” David remembers the caller saying. Still groggy, he asked her to repeat herself. By now, Victoria was wide awake, worried something terrible had happened.
“It’s Wanda at Lund,” David whispered to her. “There’s a baby being born, and she wants us.”
“So put her on fucking speakerphone!” Victoria blurted.
To the Seavers, the news felt sudden and jarring yet also long overdue. For several agonizing years, the South Burlington couple had tried to bring a pregnancy to term. After failed attempts with a fertility clinic, they pursued adoption.
Because the Seavers had requested a newborn, they expected a long wait, perhaps five years or more. But only a year had passed since they were approved for placement.
“We had a lot of dark days in those years leading up to it,” David said. “So it was very overwhelming when it finally came to be.”
Before starting the process, the Seavers assumed they had no personal connection to adoption. Then they learned that David’s sister-in-law, her sister and Victoria’s maternal grandmother were all adopted.
“We realized how close we were to adoption without even knowing it,” Victoria said.
At the hospital, the Seavers kept in mind Audette’s advice about containing their emotions upon meeting their baby, out of respect for the birth parents.
“What was the most joyful day for us can be a really hard day for the birth parents,” Victoria said, choking up. “I was surprised by how much love I immediately felt for them.”
For the birth parents, “Emily” and “Henry,” adoption was the only choice they seriously considered. (The young couple, who live in New York’s North Country, agreed to speak to Seven Days anonymously.) Audette presented them with all of their options, and Emily said she never felt pressured to choose adoption. When Emily got pregnant, she and Henry were living in a pop-up camper and had little money to support themselves, let alone a baby.
“I didn’t want to raise him the way I was raised, because I was my parents’ guinea pig and they screwed me up big-time,” Emily said. “I didn’t want that to happen to one of my children.”
After reviewing the profiles and photos of several potential parents, Emily and Henry chose the Seavers before even meeting them.
“Not to judge a book by its cover, but we liked how happy they looked,” Emily remembers. “We knew it was going to be a good home.”
For the Seavers, working with Audette was a dream.
“I have so many words I could use to describe her,” David said.
“And none of them will do her justice,” Victoria added.
As she held her baby for the first time in the hospital, Victoria was awash in emotions she couldn’t articulate. Then Audette practically read her mind.
“‘This is OK,’” Victoria remembers her saying. “‘You’re not taking this baby away from them. This is what they want. This is your child.’”
“I just remember being so thankful to have someone who was able to name this feeling,” Victoria added. “It speaks volumes to her experience and all that she’s seen.”
Before the two families went their separate ways, Audette took pictures of all five of them together. When the Seavers named their son Jack, they gave him a middle name, Beckham, that Emily and Henry had chosen.
Both couples agreed to an open adoption — meaning that the families keep in touch about Jack’s progress. David and Victoria send Emily and Henry photos and updates, and Emily is always the first to wish Victoria a happy Mother’s Day.
Less than a year later, the Seavers received a second call from Audette: Another baby had been born, this one a girl, and the birth parents had chosen them. Jack, now 2, has a little sister, Emma, whom the Seavers call “our fierce little redhead.”
Emma’s birth parents also agreed to an open adoption. Said Victoria, “We want them in our lives as much as they want to be in ours.”
A Full House
Audette, 61, has a round, ruddy face; wavy brown hair; and a motherly, get-it-done personality that one client affectionately described as “sweet but no bullshit.” The oldest of three children, she grew up in Burlington and attended Burlington High School.
Audette’s expansive idea of family was born from her own upbringing. When she was 8 years old, her father, a vice president at Chittenden Bank, and mother, who worked in the Burlington School District, began taking in unwed, expectant mothers, usually teens, from around the state who had been referred to them by Vermont Catholic Charities.
Prior to 1972, when Title IX outlawed sexual discrimination in federally funded schools, a teenage girl could be expelled from school for getting pregnant. The expectant mothers who came to Audette’s home typically told their friends, teachers or coworkers that they were going away to “care for a sick relative,” Audette said. They lived with her family for several months until their babies were born; Audette’s mother was often the one who brought them to the hospital when they went into labor. The hard part for Audette and her siblings was that these young women went home right after childbirth and she never got the chance to meet their babies or say goodbye.
A few chose to parent their children — and kept in touch with Audette’s family for years — but most of the infants were placed with adoptive families through Catholic Charities. Some sought the service of Lund, which is how Audette learned about it.
“My parents were all about giving back and … teaching us the importance of family and belonging,” Audette said. “These women needed to leave their community based on society feeling like it was shameful for them to be pregnant. And they came to our house, where there was no shame.”
After graduating from Champlain College, Audette got a job at Howard Center, where she met her husband, Bruce, who clearly shared her values about family. The newlyweds cut their honeymoon short by a week to take in a 13-year-old foster child who had nowhere else to go.
In the early 1990s, Theresa Tomasi, then-interim executive director of Lund, asked Audette if she wanted to run Lund’s residential program for pregnant and new mothers. (Tomasi, who died last month at age 97, adopted 27 children throughout her life. Audette facilitated eight of those.) Audette agreed to revamp the residential program in her free time but kept her “day job” at Howard Center. In 1995, she was asked to reform Lund’s adoption program as well. With young children still at home, Audette took a $10,000 pay cut for what was effectively a 24-7 job at Lund.
Her family wasn’t surprised. As her mother said at the time, “It’s in your blood.”
Audette’s oldest child, Katelynn Audette, 37, described a home life that was very similar to her mother’s. Katelynn has two sisters through adoption, and when she was growing up, her parents also fostered children who were in state custody.
“Our home was never just ours,” Katelynn told an audience of several hundred donors at the annual Lund by the Lake fundraiser at Hula in Burlington a few months ago. The event also celebrated her mother’s career and retirement, honoring her with Lund’s Kennedy-Byers Award for years of service and leadership.
“I remember new children walking through our door with everything they owned in a trash bag,” Katelynn said. She recalled the fear and confusion in the new arrivals’ eyes. They didn’t know where they were or how long they would stay.
“I grew up with siblings who didn’t share my DNA but shared my life, my memories, my home, my heart,” she added. Katelynn went on to became an adoptive parent herself.
At Lund, a birth mother doesn’t “put a child up for adoption” or “give away” her baby, Wanda Audette explained. “She makes a loving parenting decision to make an adoption plan.”
It’s more than a semantic difference. Unlike for-profit agencies, which need to bring in adoption revenue, the primary goal at Lund, a nonprofit, is to figure out what’s in the best interest of the birth parents and their child. Birth parents aren’t charged a fee for making an adoption plan, and Lund’s policy, largely due to Audette, is to always explain all of a birth parent’s options.
The cost of adoption varies depending on the circumstances. For private adoptions, Lund’s placement fees are on a sliding scale based on the adoptive family’s annual income. (For example, the Lefcourts, who owned a hunting, fishing and camping store in Vermont, paid about $20,000, including legal fees.) To adopt a child who is in state custody, there is no financial cost to the adoptive family.
“What I never want is for someone to say, ‘I can’t financially afford to parent this child,’ because there are support services out there,” Audette added. “They’ve got to live with that decision for the rest of their life.”
‘The Home for Friendless Women’
At Lund, the treatment of pregnant women and their babies has come a long way in the past century, a reflection of changing times and, in large part, Audette’s efforts. Today, the nonprofit has 135 employees and provides a range of services for children and families: therapeutic daycare for kids with emotional or behavioral challenges; clinical treatment, both residential and outpatient, for parents with mental health and/or substance-use issues; workforce development for training childcare workers; and parenting classes, called Kids-A-Part, for individuals incarcerated in Vermont’s correctional system.
Such services weren’t available to unwed pregnant women 135 years ago. For most of Lund’s history, the organization’s focus was on housing unwed mothers and finding adoptive families for their babies, often at the urging, if not coercion, of the women’s parents, doctors, lawyers or clergymen.
Until the mid-19th century, adoption in Vermont was a private matter, one in which the custody of a child could be transferred from biological parents to adoptive ones with no government oversight or public record. Many of those agreements were finalized with little more than a handshake and were rarely documented due to their sensitive nature and fears of ostracism.
In 1846, Vermont outlawed abortions. Seven years later, the state enacted its first adoption law — though for years thereafter, the practice was still informal. According to the Vermont Historical Society, from 1854 until 1929, an estimated 250,000 poor, homeless, neglected and orphaned children from major U.S. cities were sent by train to rural areas of the country. More than 100 came to Vermont.
Lund’s mission has evolved considerably since its founding in 1890, an era when society considered unwed mothers to be social deviants.
The Children’s Aid Society, which arranged those trips, would announce in local communities when an “orphan train” would arrive. When it did, the children were put on the station platform to be claimed — hence the now-outdated expression “put up” for adoption. Many became indentured servants. Those who were not chosen reboarded the train for the next stop.
The era was equally harsh to women who got pregnant out of wedlock. In 1890, 10 members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union looking to bring more compassion to the adoption process drew up a charter, approved by the Vermont legislature, to establish a “Home for Friendless Women” that would “provide accommodations for poor and needy women, destitute of means of support.” Almost invariably, its clients were pregnant and unwed, a fact unacknowledged in the organization’s charter until 1936.
In April 1893, the home, in a Victorian mansion at 346 Shelburne Road in Burlington — now the site of the Coldwell Banker Hickok & Boardman building — opened to its first resident: a pregnant, 38-year-old married woman whose husband had deserted her. Lund’s records indicate that she was “homeless and destitute” but “not a fallen woman.” She gave birth there on September 12, 1893.
In 1927, the organization changed its name to the Elizabeth Lund Home, in honor of one of its founders whose husband, Dr. William Lund, delivered many of the babies. The name changed to Lund Family Center in 1988 to reflect the organization’s expanded mission and, in 2012, simplified to Lund.
Some of the language from Lund’s early years is jarring to modern sensibilities. Pregnant clients — sometimes called “patients”; other times, “inmates” — were euphemistically described as “sick” and their children as “illegitimate.”
Such terms reflected societal attitudes of the times. During the 1920s and ’30s, Vermont’s eugenics movement tried to eradicate “degeneracy” from the human gene pool by promoting forced sterilization. To do so, it targeted people with a range of traits deemed undesirable, including pregnant teens, survivors of rape or incest, or others considered sexually promiscuous.
As early as the 1940s, Lund’s approach to motherhood was more enlightened. For years the Victorian house on Shelburne Road kept a jar of wedding rings by the front door so that expectant and new mothers could wear one in public and not attract the scorn of others. A letter, circa 1945, from Lund administrator Myrtle Gray to her board of trustees reveals the organization’s more client-centered priorities:
Another serious misinterpretation of our services is with regard to what plan a girl is expected to make for her child. Unfortunately, some maternity homes have been known to take a very rigid attitude toward this and as a result, we find some girls fearing to come to us for care because they have the idea that they will be required to give up their babies, and others just as fearful because of an impression that we will try to make them keep their babies. We hope you will try to help spread the fact that girls are accepted as individuals and their desires and plans treated with respect.
By the 1970s, as women got better access to birth control, demand for Lund’s adoption services started to wane. Unwanted pregnancies also declined once Vermont legalized abortion in 1972, a year before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade did so nationally. And with the second wave of feminism that began in the 1960s, it became more socially acceptable for single mothers to raise children.
In 1960, nearly 80 percent of the babies born to Lund clients were placed through adoption, usually to out-of-state couples. By 1980, three-quarters of Lund’s clients were opting instead to keep their children.
Birthing Changes
When Audette joined Lund in 1995, the agency had arranged only one adoption in the previous year. (For comparison, in 2025 it handled 216.) Private adoption agencies, including those that operated internationally, largely met local demand for adopted children.
But even by the 1990s, it was generally assumed that a pregnant woman going to Lund was choosing adoption. In those cases, typically, the mother would give birth, her baby would go to a new family, and there would be little or no further contact between them. Notably, birth parents had no say in choosing the adoptive parents, a policy Audette changed in her first six months on the job.
“We should not be making that decision,” she recalled telling the Lund staff. “I’m not God, and I don’t have a crystal ball.”
Today, birth parents can peruse a book of prospective parents that outlines who they are; their interests, skills and hobbies; and their hopes and dreams for raising a child. Birth parents can even interview candidates before making their decision. Adoptive parents can, with the birth mother’s permission, be part of her pregnancy, go to her doctor’s appointments, attend the delivery and cut the umbilical cord.
Audette implemented another important change: Prior to her arrival, birth mothers often didn’t hold their babies before relinquishing them. Though Lund never requires a birth mother to do so, Audette developed a ritual, of sorts, to ease that emotionally fraught process.
“We don’t want you to say goodbye,” Audette would tell birth parents. “We want you to say, ‘Until we meet again.’”
When many people think of adoptions, she explained, they imagine that “Hallmark moment” when a childless couple finally get the baby of their dreams and everyone lives happily ever after. But sometimes, the reality is more sobering.
Under state law, birth parents have a 21-day grace period in which they can change their minds. Adoptive parents must sign a waiver accepting that risk.
“Have we had birth parents change their mind and had to remove a baby from an intended adoptive family? Yes,” Audette said. “In my 30 years, I’ve personally done that four times. It was horrible.”
The good news: All of those adoptive parents were eventually paired with another child.
Audette also placed a baby who was later diagnosed with a rare and fatal genetic disorder. The adoptive parents called her from the hospital chapel to say that, because she was the one who had placed their baby in their arms, she was the only one who could take their infant away. “I had to walk that baby to the morgue,” she said.
There were far more joyous moments, however, as evidenced by her office wall at Lund’s South Burlington headquarters, which was covered with photos of smiling children and families.
Audette recalled that when she joined Lund, the organization hosted an annual picnic each fall for adoptees and their families; 15 to 20 people would attend. In a reflection of not only the number of adoptions that Lund has helped finalize but also the change in attitudes Audette encouraged, last year’s picnic, held at the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction, drew more than 800, including adoptive families and birth parents alike.
Family Matters
Lund handles two types of adoptions: private and public. Private adoptions are when a birth mother decides she is unwilling or unable to raise that child herself and makes an adoption plan. The birth parents may live in Vermont or elsewhere; if the latter, Lund works with a reputable adoption agency that it has previously vetted.
In her first few years at Lund, Audette arranged 25 to 30 private adoptions from overseas. She ended that practice after human rights groups raised concerns that some babies in other countries were being obtained through coercion, abduction or human trafficking. Since peaking in 2004, international adoptions have plummeted by 94 percent.
Public adoptions, which now comprise the majority of Lund adoptions, happen when the courts have terminated the parental rights of the biological mother and father and their child has been placed in state custody, or foster care. As of June 30, 184 children in state custody were “freed” for adoption, a number that has risen in recent years due to the opioid crisis. Thanks to Audette, finding adoptive parents for all of those kids is now a priority for Lund.
It didn’t happen overnight. In 2000, Audette and the state’s then-adoption director, Diane Dexter, began looking into why the Vermont Department for Children and Families wasn’t finding families for the dozens of children in state custody. They had heard that people who had contacted DCF were told there were no children available for adoption, which both knew to be untrue.
As they discovered, the state had labeled 90 children in its custody, most of them ages 7 to 18, “unadoptable.” Audette was aghast. As she put it, “There are no ‘unadoptable’ kids, just unfound homes.”
So Audette and Dexter wrote a five-year federal grant, which they got, and launched Project Family, a public-private collaboration of Lund and DCF. Its goal was to find families for all 90 kids in state custody at the time. The project succeeded in less than five years.
There are no “unadoptable” children.
wanda audette
Project Family is now funded through DCF’s budget and has since found permanent homes for more than 4,300 children. As the number of kids in state custody has risen, Audette partnered with the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, in Dublin, Ohio, which funds recruiters to find permanent homes for children who linger in foster care the longest — specifically, teens, siblings and children with special needs. Said Audette, “We don’t find kids for families. We find families for kids.”
Once those families are connected to Lund, that relationship is lasting, with services available after the adoption has been finalized. “Adoption isn’t a one-and-done,” Audette said. “It’s lifelong.”
And doing it correctly takes more than a checklist. For Audette, making a good match was a delicate blend of art and science.
During the rigorous home-study process, she would interview the adoptee’s potential siblings and ask questions such as: “What happens when Mom and Dad don’t agree on something?” and “If you could change one thing about your parents, what would you change?”
The kinds of answers Audette liked to hear: “I wish my parents would let me stay up later” or “I wish they’d let me have a cellphone.” A potential red flag: “I wish my parents would be around more.”
“Do we want to put another kid in this family when these kids aren’t feeling connected?” Audette said.
Similarly, when she asked about the likes and dislikes of prospective adoptive parents, it was because she wanted a good match with the birth parents. If they were artistic, musical, athletic or intellectual, Audette looked for opportunities for the child to flourish in those ways.
She also tried to ensure that adoptive parents didn’t have preconceived notions of whom their child would become. She remembers sitting at a table with a prospective father who said he was looking forward to his son going to the same high school and being a football star like his old man. She asked the man: What would he do if his son preferred ballet?
“His response to me was, ‘No son of mine is going to be a ballerina,’” she said. Before she would approve them for adoption, Audette suggested the couple seek counseling.
A Phone Call Away
For decades, birth parents decided whether their child’s adoption records would stay sealed during their lifetime. But since July 1, 2023, anyone over the age of 18 who was adopted in Vermont has the right to access their original (that is, pre-adoption) birth certificate and learn the identities of their biological parents. That right also extends to the descendants of people who were adopted.
Lund is the official repository of all adoption records for children born in the state. So Audette and her staff had some difficult conversations with birth parents, including some whose children were placed with families decades ago and assumed their records would stay sealed for 99 years, as state law once required.
“That did not go over well with some people,” Audette said. “They felt lied [to] and cheated.”
Though Audette had hoped the Vermont legislature would grandfather in those who had chosen to keep their records sealed, “We also think it’s important for kids to know their history,” she said. “A secret about a birthday present is really good. A secret about somebody’s life is eventually going to be told.”
Adoption isn’t a one-and-done. It’s lifelong.
wanda audette
For Jennifer and Norm Staunton, openness about their adopted son’s history was always paramount and, as Norm put it, “nonnegotiable.” Charlie, who is 2.5, doesn’t look anything like his parents, a fact the South Burlington couple were more than happy to discuss with a reporter at the Lund by the Lake fundraiser. Unlike his blond mother and fair-haired father, both of whom are white, Charlie has light brown skin and a curly mop of dark brown hair.
As Charlie gobbled down a plate of olives, his parents dispelled many of the common myths and misconceptions that people often express to them about their son: No, adoption wasn’t their “second choice” or “backup plan” after their own pregnancy didn’t work out. Adoption was their preferred option.
“People also say, ‘He’s so lucky to have landed with you!’ We don’t see it that way,” Jennifer said. “We’re the lucky ones to have him in our lives.”
For the Stauntons, it is critically important that Charlie know not just his biological parents but also their extended families and heritage.
“We are a white couple who has adopted a biracial son. There isn’t a lot of representation for him in Vermont,” Jennifer added. “Norm and I aren’t adopted, so we won’t always be able to understand the complexities of what that means for him.”
“That’s what was really wonderful about Wanda,” Norman added. “She got to know us well as a couple, and now as a family. Like her, we’ve always believed that the more people that love a child, the better.”
Audette leaves behind a capable and experienced adoption staff at Lund, many of whom she trained herself. And while she no longer draws a paycheck, she regularly hears from families she helped, receiving invitations to birthday parties, graduations and weddings. Her kids joke that she needs to wear a mask when she goes out in public because she gets recognized so often.
More than a month into her retirement, Audette still gets phone calls at least five times a week from clients who want to check in or ask for advice. She has no plans to change her number.
“This work isn’t just what I’ve done,” she said. “It’s who I am.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Matchmaker | Lund, Vermont’s oldest nonprofit adoption agency, has found families for more than 12,000 children. Wanda Audette arranged nearly half of them.”
This article appears in August 12 • 2026.
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